The Fisherman

The Fisherman, a 2016 novel by John Langan, blends realism with ripples of folklore, fantasy, and literary horror to craft an ominous saga of a fishing trip gone wrong. Set in the lonely reaches of New York’s Hudson River Valley, Langan’s story embraces the grotesque as it bestrides two narrative streams: a contemporary account of grief, guilt, and cosmic horror, and an embedded tale about strange events plaguing the construction of the Ashokan Reservoir in the early 20th century.

This guide refers to the 2016 Word Horde paperback edition.

Content Warning: The source text and guide contain descriptions of graphic violence, sexual content, child death, emotional abuse, suicide, substance use, mental illness, cursing, and racism.

Plot Summary

Abe Samuelson, like many hobby fishermen is known for telling remarkable stories, but he opines that one in particular is “downright awful.” It began with the death of his young wife, Marie, who succumbed to cancer only two years after their marriage. To manage his grief, Abe took up fishing, first at New York State’s Svartkil River and then farther afield, exploring the Catskills’ many rivers, streams, and lakes.

Now, when Dan Drescher, a coworker at IBM, loses his wife and children in an auto accident, Abe invites him along, hoping to pass on the solace of this hobby to help the depressed young man. After a year, Dan suggests trying out a new stream called Dutchman’s Creek, which he claims to have read about in a history of the Catskills. Though Abe senses that Dan is hiding something, he agrees. On the way, they stop for breakfast at their usual café, where the convivial proprietor, Howard, turns pale when he hears of their destination. Urging them not to go, he tells them a long, fantastical story about Dutchman’s Creek, saying that he heard it from a local reverend, who heard it from an elderly woman named Lottie Schmidt, shortly before she died.

Lottie’s story concerns the Esopus River Valley (now the site of the vast Ashokan Reservoir, which provides New York City with much of its drinking water). In the 1840s, long before the reservoir, the valley was still home to a number of villages. One day, a stranger appeared in the valley. Believed to be a foreigner, this nameless man dressed all in black and drove a carriage with strange hieroglyphics on its wheels. Despite his eccentricities, which bordered on the occult, he was welcomed by the local tycoon, Cornelius Dort, and became his longtime house guest. Upon Dort’s death, “the Guest,” who never seemed to age, inherited Dort’s house and property.

In the early 20th century, hundreds of workers, many of them immigrants, flooded into the Esopus Valley to help with the construction of the new reservoir. Among them were the teenaged Lottie Schmidt and her family, who had left Germany a couple of years before due to a scandal involving Lottie’s father, who was a professor of languages. Soon after their arrival at the work camp, a neighbor of theirs, a Hungarian woman named Helen, was run over and killed. After the funeral, to the horror of everyone except her nervous, grinning husband, Helen seemed to come back from the dead, but her eyes were gold like a fish’s, and her pores continually dripped water. Worst of all, she knew her neighbors’ most shameful secrets and desires, including those of Lottie. Lottie’s father, Rainer Schmidt, suspected that Helen’s “resurrection” had something to do with the late Cornelius Dort’s mysterious, reclusive “Guest,” whom Rainer believed may have been a sorcerer. Seeking answers, Rainer consulted an old book that radiated a “black light.” (It was due to a scandal involving this very book that Rainer had to flee Germany years ago.)

Using magical words and gestures from the book, Rainer removed Helen’s threat by dissolving her into a “fall of water” (127). Then, with a hand-picked group of companions, he ventured into Dort House itself, which turned out to be a portal into an otherworldly realm washed by a black sea, where the Guest (also called “the Fisherman”) waged battle with a gigantic, snakelike creature known as the Leviathan. The Fisherman, Rainer learned, had been trying to tame the Leviathan since the late 1500s, after his wife and children were slaughtered in Budapest, ostensibly by soldiers. By harnessing one of the universe’s “Great Powers,” the Fisherman hoped to restore his family to life. However, to keep himself young and strong to wage his great battle, he had been feeding off the life-force of people like Helen and her husband, and he planned to do the same with the other villagers.

With axes bearing charmed runes, Rainer and his companions chopped away at the massive fishing lines that the Fisherman had hooked into the Levithan’s immense body. Their courageous efforts partly succeed; the Fisherman, impaled by his own hooks, was swept out to sea, and the Leviathan regained some of its freedom. However, Rainer warned his companions that the Fisherman would probably survive and might resume his malevolent quest. To make matters worse, one of their group, Angelo, became possessed by the Fisherman’s dark magic and was killed by Lottie’s suitor, Jacob.

Years later, after the completion of the Ashokan Reservoir, the Water Authority asked Rainer, now one of its specialists, to trace the course of a mysterious creek. Later dubbed Dutchman’s Creek, this body of water was a haunted finger of the Leviathan’s “black ocean.” As Rainer and his son-in-law Jacob followed its snaking banks, voices of the dead rose up to accuse them. Jacob encountered Angelo, the friend he killed during the battle at Dort House, and Rainer was haunted by Wilhelm Vanderwort (a German colleague who died after the two of them had delved too recklessly into Rainer’s occult discoveries). Now, the disembodied voices tried to tempt Ranier and Jacob into death by suicide, but Rainer calmed Jacob and led him away. Lastly, he carved a magic symbol into the side of a tree to ward off future visitors.

The narrative returns to the present day. After Howard finishes his tale, Abe and Dan leave the café, and Dan still insists on going to Dutchman’s Creek. Once they have parked in the woods by the creek, Dan confesses his true reason for coming. He harbors a desperate hope that the Fisherman will restore his wife and children. Abe follows him into the woods, trying to reason with him, but before he can catch up with his friend, Abe comes across an impossible sight: his dead wife Marie, who is youthful and seductively naked. The only thing amiss are her golden fish eyes. Rapturously, Abe makes love to her but then watches in horror as she changes into a humanoid monster with a jutting jaw, razor-sharp teeth, and webbed, clawed fingers.

Searching for Dan upstream, Abe comes to a peninsula that juts into a black sea. There he sees the Fisherman, bound to a huge rock by many crisscrossing ropes, and he realizes that the peninsula is the great Leviathan, which the Fisherman has hooked and roped almost to the point of paralysis. At the Fisherman’s feet sits Dan, with his dead wife and children at his side. Their eyes are gold. As Abe watches, their faces briefly transform, just as Marie’s did, into razor-toothed monsters. However, Dan ignores this and angrily brushes off Abe’s warnings, then tries to kill Abe with a rock, saying that the Fisherman “needs” Abe’s strength. Abe fights back with a knife, wounding Dan, and Dan’s “family” smelling blood, falls upon Dan and devours him. Fleeing, Abe falls into the turbulent water and is almost drowned by “Marie.” The next day, a couple of teenagers find him lying senseless on the riverbank and call for an ambulance.

Over 10 years later, a hurricane causes the stream behind Abe’s house to overflow, and his neighborhood is flooded with several feet of water. As Abe makes dinner by candlelight, a cadaverous, gold-eyed version of Dan crawls out of the muddy depths and into his house. Bitterly, this creature accuses Abe of causing his death at Dutchman’s Creek. Abe manages to fend him off by igniting him with an aerosol spray, and the creature vanishes back into the water. The next day, as a rescue boat removes Abe from his house, he sees many “rows” of white bodies in the floodwater, all with golden eyes and sharp teeth. Among them is Marie, along with two “children”: a girl and a boy, both on the cusp of adolescence. Abe notes that they have his “mother’s nose.”